HAPPY COINCIDENCE: You may meet your prospective employer on a plane or in a cab

On a Sunday night last year, sitting in a window seat waiting for the plane to take off, Megan Ferington had no idea the skies that awaited her would be so friendly or auspicious. She had spent the previous year working at an advertising agency in Salt Lake City, her first job after receiving a masters degree in public relations from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. But a desire for a new professional challenge had prompted her to sell her furniture and car and buy a one-way ticket to New York City.

“Everyone in Salt Lake thought I was completely nuts, because I was moving here without a job, without a place to stay, and I had only been to the city once before, as a tourist,” says Ferington, 24.

She noticed that the man sitting next to her was reading a media-related story that she thought might come in handy for the several job interviews she had lined up for the next day. She asked him if she could have a look after he finished, leading to a conversation about her career aspirations. “He had a kind of a grin on his face that led me to believe this guy might know something,” she says. Her instincts turned out to be on the money.

Unknown to Ferington, Stan Bratskeir, the owner and president of his own public relations firm, Bratskeir & Company, in New York ? and a friend of the man in the middle seat ? had been listening in from the aisle seat.

Impressed with her independence and confidence in coming to New York with no real prospects ? that rated high in the “moxie box”, he said ? Bratskeir introduced himself, said he would be happy to take a look at her r?sum? and suggested she stop by for an interview, which she did, two days later.

Four days after that, she was offered an account executive position, which she accepted right away. Within two weeks, she was at her desk, a full-fledged employee at Bratskeir. “I think people are really amazed with my story because it has an element of fate to it,” Ferington says. Her in-flight conversation was probably about as long as a typical corporate interview, but was much less formal and probably more revealing. “I felt like he knew me as a person and liked my character,” she says.

She added that she found it hard to believe that anyone who listened to intuition and believed in the synchronicity of being in the right place at the right time could discount the significance of finding a potential business connection outside the office.

Bratskeir is no stranger to the benefits of chance meetings. “I’ve met a lot of people whom I’ve ultimately hired in unusual ways, like while sitting in restaurants,” he says. “You have a much better opportunity to really learn about somebody, because their defenses are down.”

Bratskeir talked openly with his staff about the uncanny meeting with Ferington, but other employers are reluctant to discuss such serendipitous hires. One person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described sharing a short cab ride with a stranger who happened to have a departmental opening. That connection led to a job, after a battery of tests and formal interviews.

The company’s employees were not told about the cab ride, probably “because it was such a chance encounter,” the new employee said. He suggested that the circumstances might be interpreted as not taking the hiring process seriously.

This reluctance to honour chance does not surprise Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005), which describes the phenomenon of very quick decision-making.

“That’s one of the truths about decisions we make instinctively ? we are embarrassed by them,” says Gladwell, who says it is “highly typical” to cover up decisions made this way. “I wish we were a little more honest about how we make decisions. But the fact remains that in these kinds of workplace settings, there’s a culture that’s very hostile to the idea that we make up our minds on the spur of the moment.”

Job seekers, however, tend to be less concerned with corporate opinion of the process than in being hired, by whatever means necessary. These people may be happy to know that they can greatly improve their odds of turning chance meetings into opportunities.

The answer lies in understanding the configuration of the brain. The limbic system is involved with intuition, hunches and emotion, and the frontal lobe is the part that censors emotions and discourages impulsive behaviour, said Mona Lisa Schulz, a neuropsychiatrist in Yarmouth, whose clientele includes people who want to know how to use their intuition more productively.

Schulz, the author of Awakening Intuition: Using Your Mind-Body Network for Insight and Healing (Three Rivers Press, 1999) and The New Feminine Brain (Free Press, 2005), said that people with “double-D frontal lobes” would never have initiated a conversation, as Ferington did, even if their instinct told them to.

“Your frontal lobe would say, ‘I can’t do that, he’ll think I’m a nut,’” says Schulz, who suggests ways for people to counteract those fears. “You push your edge, try to break a bit of your former rules about how to engage, and notice your discomfort and anxiety. Go to someone in a restaurant and ask them what they’re eating. You’re stretching the limit of what you consider politeness and social comportment. You experience the anxiety, but acknowledge this is truly not a dangerous situation.”

Networking to find a job is increasingly hard work, so it is easy to understand the appeal of landing a job interview while standing in line for a movie or over a steam table at lunch time. But for Andrea R. Nierenberg, president of the Nierenberg Group, a Manhattan marketing consultancy, taking advantage of any chance meeting is a form of networking.

“Networking is a state of mind,” says Nierenberg, author of Nonstop Networking: How to Improve Your Life, Luck and Career (Capital Books, 2002) and the forthcoming Million Dollar Networking.

“Someone can be in a cab and just say, ‘Nice weather we’re having,’ but could also take the bull by the horns and say, ‘So, what do you do?’ and get into a discussion and a rapport,” Nierenberg says.

If you conceal too many of your needs, she said, people will not know what you want, and they will leave the meeting none the wiser.

“I’ve made connections getting my nails done, on the top of the Tokyo Tower and standing by the ladies’ room,” she says. “You never know where that connection could lead.” There is evidence that subjugating the fears of your frontal lobe may help your career. “There are many people in corporate culture who are Type A’s, driven, impulsive and risk-taking,” Schulz says.

“They have less frontal-lobe censoring and are more likely to act on their limbic system hunches. They are very much rewarded. Donald Trump is a perfect example.”

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